THE HOT CORNER: Some times are still not a-changin'

by Jim Allen (May 1, 2008)

It's one thing to talk about change and enjoy the positive vibes
that engenders. It's another thing to make the necessarily hard choices
and act on them.

When the Hiroshima Carp needed change in 2006, they were not going
to mess around with another Japanese manager. What they needed was
something drastic. Toward that end, they hired former Carp outfielder
Marty Brown to spearhead the effort.

A year later, the Orix Buffaloes got in on the act by hiring former
major league manager Terry Collins. This put half the Pacific League
and a third of Nippon Professional Baseball under foreign management.

It made sense at the time.

Bobby Valentine skippered the Chiba Lotte Marines to a Japan Series
pennant in 2005. The same year Brown was hired, Trey Hillman repeated
Valentine's feat with the Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters.

Valentine was given something close to carte blanche in remaking the
Marines. The Fighters' move to Sapporo required the club reorganize,
and Hillman, a man with excellent organizational and people skills, was
in the right place at the right time to inform the process.

The Marines and Fighters are now light years from their struggles of the previous two decades.

In short, the formula for these success stories went as follows: 1)
Hire a proven foreign manager and 2) Enlist his aid in reorganizing
things.

Considering how things have gone since Hiroshima and Orix jumped on
the bandwagon, one can imagine the decision-making process going
something like this: Some clever guy presents the above strategy to the
owner, who sees Part 1, says "Great idea! Let's get ourselves a foreign
manager!" and abruptly calls an end to the meeting.

Meaningful discussion over, each organization embarked on a PR
campaign about its desire for change. What the clubs didn't say was
that they had no interest in making any of the necessary but
uncomfortable changes.

Brown and Collins run the show in spring and autumn camps and they
decide how to use first-team personnel. They can give individual
players tough choices, as Collins did with catcher Takeshi Hidaka last
year.

"I told him, 'Either adopt a new [batting] approach or don't play,
it's your choice,'" Collins said Saturday. "He worked his ass off, and
now he's batting .314 with four homers--he hit five homers all of last
season."

But when it comes to things beyond what the manager can supervise on a daily basis, like the farm team? Forget about it.

Most teams continue to operate more or less as they did in the days
before free agency drove up operating costs and the recession
body-slammed budgets. To adapt to today's reality would require honest
evaluation and creativity--unlikely if top executives are satisfied by
the ubiquitous rationale "That's the way we've always done it in
Japan."

On the field, the game continues to thrive on hitting logical foul pops.

Last Friday, Brown and Carp head coach Jeff Livesey watched as a
Yokohama coach hit ground balls to BayStars catchers, one element in
almost every club's identical pre-game practice fix.

"You think they benefit from that? If you want an individual to work
on something, fine. Take him down to the bullpen and block balls in the
dirt. How does this help them get ready for the game? But every team
does it," said Brown, who has had mixed results even in reorganizing
the way his own team practices.

He said he'll ask that one of his staff stop doing something and it stops, temporarily.

"They say, 'That's how we've always done it.' They'll stop, but a
couple of weeks later they're doing it again--and I have to get in
someone's face," Brown said.

"Every day, every park, every team, you see the same thing."

The words struck a chord as Carp players and coaches took the field and began going through their scripted maneuvers.

In the same spot where the BayStars coach had been hitting ground
balls to his catchers, a Carp coach energetically went through
identical motions with his guys.